


chirality

by spookykingdomstarlight



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Happy Ending, Love Confessions, M/M, Marriage, Pining, Teasing, Woke Up Married After A Drunk Night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-06
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-07-29 18:46:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20086996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookykingdomstarlight/pseuds/spookykingdomstarlight
Summary: “I’m pretty sure I’m the one who actually proposed,” Shepard replied into the sticky, stretched silence that followed Garrus’s admission. If he was a more romantic person, he’d have told Garrus he loved him, too, but he’d spent so long holding those words back, hiding that fact from Garrus entirely, that letting them loose now was impossible. They clung to the back of his throat, wouldn’t dislodge themselves from the inside of his mouth.





	chirality

**Author's Note:**

  * For [butterpanic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/butterpanic/gifts).

Shepard woke up with only the second worst headache of his life and he chose to be grateful for that fact even while he prayed for the sweet merciful swing of Death’s scythe with every sluggish, throbbing pulse of blood through his brain. “Fuck,” he said, throat rasping, tongue dry as the surface of Tuchanka. Grappling for the nightstand, he flinched as he knocked something off of it and then nearly whited out as an alarm sounded out.

“I’m going to murder you,” another voice said, equally raspy, but that wasn’t so unusual with voices attached to turians, “and then I’m going to murder everyone you love.” What was unusual was the fact that there was a turian in his bed at all. Fuck. There was a turian in his bed. And through the haze of pain and regret, he registered that it was Garrus in his bed. “And then I’m going to find two billion credits so I can resurrect every inch of you so I can murder you again. Will you please shut that damned thing off? Who even has an actual alarm clock? Is this some kind of sick human thing?”

Still too hung up on it being Garrus who was here, Shepard grappled, half hanging off the bed as he stretched to find the alarm. He very nearly fell off, but talons—and yep, those were Garrus’s all right—grabbed hold of his arm to keep him from spilling onto the floor. Even just that touch against his skin hurt, but Shepard was an N7; he wasn’t going to cry ‘ouch’ over a boo boo.

Silence almost as painful as the banshee shriek of the alarm fell over the room. Shepard’s head pulsed and his vision swam and Chakwas was going to do some murdering of her own, too, whenever Shepard was able to slink into the medbay.

“Spirits,” Garrus spat, letting go of Shepard and flopping over dramatically on the other side of the bed as Shepard crawled around and got into something approaching a comfortable position. Not that Shepard thought much about it—that was a lie, a desperate one even, but he was too dehydrated to force himself to think on that—but turians were pokier than he might have imagined. Despite Garrus’s vehemence, his voice was warm and the extra layer of roughness just added to the appeal. “I fucking hate you.”

Shepard grinned up at the ceiling even though that only made the throbbing in his head worse. “You want some water?” he asked, not daring to face the larger question, which was: what the hell are you even doing here? If he didn’t seem concerned about it, Shepard wouldn’t be either. Though he rather wished he had a clue. His most rationale musings suggested they’d come here after hitting Purgatory, which further suggested they’d found more liquor to drink, and then just right got to be too much and suddenly, whoops, your turian best friend became your bunk mate for the night.

It was the first time this had happened in years, but it wasn’t actually the first time. Shepard knew how to navigate this sort of thing. Repress. Ignore. Laugh it off in the light of day. It was fine. Everything was good. It wasn’t like Shepard really wanted the trouble of a bunk mate anyway. It was already hard enough to accomplish anything when he knew every day there was a chance he or Garrus or any of them might not make it out.

Groaning, Garrus cursed at him again, very colorfully, before acquiescing.

Now all Shepard had to do was remember how to coordinate his legs. At least there wasn’t nausea as he swung them over the edge of the bed. Though Garrus unhelpfully shoving at Shepard’s back did leave him a bit woozy for a moment. “You didn’t give me turian brandy, did you? I only ask because I feel like I might be dying.”

One clumsy step. Another. He felt a little more human with each one. In some ways, that made it worse. Knowing he was human made the pain hurt just a little worse, like being entirely cognizant of it meant it had to be sharpened, too.

“You’d still be unconscious,” Garrus replied, a dragging lilt on the final word so Shepard could hear him from the commode. “Or a coma. Or asphyxiated. Don’t remember what it does to you Levos. Not very pleasant.”

He ran the tap and filled the single glass he kept with water as cold as he could get it. Probably he should’ve left it lukewarm to avoid further upsets—that was what the reasonable part of his brain supplied—but fuck no, he’d suffer a cramp or two for cold water. It was only when he lifted the glass to his mouth that he noticed the band of silver glinting around his finger. In his shock, he dropped the glass. It thudded in protestation, spilling into the sink. The noise was abominable, never ending, but every thought of his hangover retreated as he grabbed for it, intending to pull it from his shaking hand and toss it away.

There was another thudding sound, this time from out near the bed, and then the recognizable sound of Garrus’s approach. “You didn’t collapse, did you?” He didn’t sound terribly concerned as he rounded on the entry, hanging from the open doorway. And then his eyes narrowed at Shepard and something shifted in his mandibles and all he did was make a small, humming sound. If he was concerned, he didn’t show it.

He didn’t remember a damned thing about last night, not after he and Garrus made the decision to go to Purgatory, and though he’d not felt terribly sick before, he did now. What the fuck had he been thinking? He leaned against the sink in the hopes that it wouldn’t look too obvious that the ground beneath his feet was shifting under him and tried to make sense of the fact he was wearing a wedding ring. That at some point in the last twelve hours or so, he’d decided to put one on.

“What did I do?” Shepard asked, imagining all sorts of horrible scenarios. There was no matching ring on Garrus’s finger or anything else on him as far as Shepard could see, so it couldn’t have been him. But Garrus wouldn’t have let him do something so stupid with somebody else either, would he? Maybe it was a joke. It wasn’t like putting a ring on his finger was legally binding.

His omnitool buzzed and blinked and dread settled in his gut as the words ‘Congratulations, Commander Shepard’ flashed across his arm.

“What did I _do_?” Shepard repeated, knowing the dangerous, fearful note in his voice was probably a bit more than the situation required, but he couldn’t help it. Something big and angry welled up inside of him: self-recrimination, guilt, a reminder that he couldn’t marry the person he wanted to marry, not really, because he didn’t even—

He’d never thought of marriage as something he wanted until this moment when he had it as a result of some stupid, drunken night out.

This didn’t happen to people. And it didn’t happen to Commander Shepard, the first human Spectre, hero of the blah blah blah who gives a shit when he’s just trying to do his job. This was an embarrassment and a slap in the face and—

“This, ah, might actually be my fault,” Garrus said, chagrined. “You know how I get when I’ve been drinking.”

“Maudlin,” Shepard answered. “You get maudlin.” He didn’t see how his own wedding followed from that. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

Garrus lifted his hand. Between his fingers, another ring glinted in his palm, a chain curled around and through it. “I might have proposed.”

“_Might_ have proposed?”

Wincing, Garrus wrapped the talons of his other hand around the back of his exposed neck. Shepard didn’t dare let his gaze drift any further down. “I, uh, definitely proposed.”

Shepard held up a hand to stop him, refilled the glass, and popped a few painkillers from the medicine cabinet into his mouth. It was as much a diversionary tactic as it was a necessary step to getting rid of this headache. His mind was a whirl. Hurt, hope, anger, all of it a bright, painful mishmash inside of him. He hated himself for forgetting what had happened, for apparently getting too drunk to realize he might not remember. Swallowing back bile, he asked, “Because you were maudlin?”

What a dumb fuck thing he’d done, saying yes to that.

Garrus took the glass from Shepard’s hand, rough and impatient, and swallowed the water that remained. “Because I love you,” he said simply, in self-recrimination, “and because I was maudlin, yeah.”

Garrus stilled. And then Shepard. And then through the hangover-soaked sluggishness of his thoughts, Shepard remembered everything, the hopeless way Garrus had talked, late into the night, when everything was winding down and even the most enthusiastic of dancers started departing. They’d grabbed a shadowy booth near the bar at some point, only a few other patrons still around, the bartender preparing to turn anyone down who ordered anything more complicated than a shot.

He’d shared every ounce of longing he’d felt, that Shepard hadn’t even seen, and jokingly—too sharp to be a joke, Shepard should have seen it, but he knew now what he’d felt and it was a lot like hitting an unexpected lottery, though now he worried it had been him taking advantage—suggested they be alone together.

Shepard hadn’t put two and two together, didn’t equate that longing Garrus felt for something more with a longing that he might have felt for Shepard specifically, but he’d come up with the right answer anyway and, drunken genius that he was, told him that there was an all-night chapel somewhere around here, we could just…

Shepard had kind of been joking, kind of not in ways he hadn’t wanted to examine too closely, merely hoping to pull Garrus from the worst of his doldrums with a ridiculous suggestion. It was the kind of harebrained scheme only an alcohol-soaked mind could cook up. The kind of scheme that would only work on an equally alcohol-soaked mind.

They were, maybe, a pair of dumbasses.

Not least of all because Shepard had had no idea what Garrus felt for him until he came out and said it.

“I’m pretty sure I’m the one who actually proposed,” Shepard replied into the sticky, stretched silence that followed Garrus’s admission. If he was a more romantic person, he’d have told Garrus he loved him, too, but he’d spent so long holding those words back, hiding that fact from Garrus entirely, that letting them loose now was impossible. They clung to the back of his throat, wouldn’t dislodge themselves from the inside of his mouth.

He regretted that. So, so much.

He could do the next best thing though.

Opening his medicine cabinet again, he pulled a packet of the sublingual medications turians tended to prefer and tossed it Garrus’s way, something he had very little reason to keep here except on the off-chance one day he’d have a reason for such a measure.

“Bring a lot of turians back here, huh?” Garrus asked, approaching his normal dry and deprecating tone, but they wouldn’t be best friends if Shepard couldn’t read the reluctantly amused pleasure in his voice, if Garrus couldn’t recognize the gesture for the hope it implied, the things it said when he couldn’t say anything at all. The minute Garrus snooped in the nightstand, he’d see an entirely different brand of hope, a little crasser, but that could wait for another time. As long as Garrus didn’t doubt what Shepard meant, it was fine.

And it seemed he understood perfectly.

“A whole parade of them,” Shepard agreed.

“Some humans do have fetishes, it’s true.” Garrus ran his talons over his mandibles, lingering on the long-healed scars along the half of his face he’d so stupidly gotten blown off on Omega. He wasn’t wrong, though. It wasn’t only Krogan women who had a thing for them. If Shepard could claim a fetish, that would be it, though it wasn’t specific to turians. “Nothing to be ashamed of, of course. Who could blame you?”

“Handsome guy like you?” Stepping closer, Shepard allowed a smile to pull at the corner of his mouth. “You’re right. No one would convict.”

Garrus’s mandibles clicked and his eyes couldn’t quite pick a place on which to settle, gaze darting from Shepard’s face to his chest to his hips and back up. Then away. Then back again. “I’m a lot smoother with other turians, I’ll have you know, but, uh, your torso is very…”

Garrus was within a hair’s breadth of having the life kissed out of him and he didn’t even know it.

“…structured. Architectural. The planes are…” His talons lifted, sketched a vague, perhaps ‘architectural’ shape, in the scant inches between them. “…aesthetically pleasing.”

Never before in the history of this galaxy or any other had such a dubiously phrased compliment ever managed to sound so sexy and surprisingly heartfelt.

Only Garrus Vakarian could manage that despite himself.

Garrus winced, perhaps not realizing just how charming he was managing to be anyway. “I like your eyes?”

A wellspring of affection bubbled up in Shepard’s chest, threatened to spill from his lips in the form of a laugh, probably the last thing Garrus wanted to hear right now.

He took the chain from Garrus’s hand, opened the clasp and held it out so he could place it around Garrus’s neck. Presumably there was a more turian marriage tradition that Shepard would happily indulge in when they next had a chance—tattoos possibly, he’d get a tattoo for Garrus, loved the idea of it—but for now, he allowed himself to be taken with the bright, shining band of metal sitting between Garrus’s whipcord slim pectoral muscles.

Placing his hand over Garrus’s chest, covering that ring with his palm, he leaned in, pushed Garrus out of the bathroom and back toward the bed, hangover forgotten, everything forgotten except Garrus’s admission and the ache in his own chest as he turned it over in his mind.

Those words he thought he wouldn’t be able to say spilled unbidden from his lips, were whispered against Garrus’s carapace easier than anything, an admission he never thought he’d be allowed to make.

He intended to make the most of it, banish as many of Garrus’s doldrums for as long as he’d be allowed to do so. That hadn’t changed just because they got married, but it did widen the avenues open to him pursuant of that goal.

And Shepard looked forward to exploring each one. 


End file.
